An
Encounter with Russia

I haven't been to Moscow for 16
years. It's now December 2006, and two months in Russia lie ahead of me: two
weeks in St Petersburg, the rest in Moscow. I won't talk here about meeting
relatives and friends. We've all, of course, changed, grown older.... except for
my grandchildren, who are young and beautiful. Of my friends, many are no
longer. Not Zorya Meletinsky, the terrific expert on ancient mythology; nor
Valentin Berestov, the fine poet and archaeologist; nor Aleksandr Osipov, the
dear companion of my school years. Glimpsing the faces of the living, you
suddenly recognise yourself in them: the self of today.

My notes are a series of
unrelated impressions, and reflections on what I saw. Nothing more. But it may
be that from time to time I've managed to see something that those who live
permanently in Russia don't notice.

Sixteen years ago, our building
was one of a multitude of residential blocks which had sprung up on the
south-eastern fringes of Moscow: still decent and clean, pleasant to enter,
inhabited by cultured and pleasant people. Entering it now, I was horrified.
Foul-smelling stairwells littered with cigarette butts and spit, letterboxes
with broken doors in the entranceway, the lift cabin plastered with pasted-on
advertisements and etched with graffiti. The stair landings around the rubbish
chute covered with rotting, discarded left-overs; the impression that waste
bucket contents haven't made it to the rubbish chute, but tipped out straight
onto the floor. And everywhere, empty bottles. The apartment entrances remind
you of a prison or zoo: steel doors, bars, elaborately complicated locks. Every
apartment is a castle: not an imaginary one, as in the well-known English
expression, but very real. It seemed as though a hurricane had carried away the
building's former, cultured residents, and the new ones lived in fear of being
robbed or murdered, and no longer cared about cleanliness. In the evenings and
also by day, clusters of young people mill on the landings of the lower floors,
drinking something and discussing their affairs. Cigarette smoke blends with
thick obscenities. Our neighbours turned out to be young Vietnamese – the
Gastarbeiteren who have inundated Moscow. They were constantly smoking on
the stairs, leaving behind them a landing strewn with cigarette butts and a
persistent stench of tobacco which penetrated our apartment through the double
doors.

At the same time, the building's
communal services are in completely good order. The hot water, electricity and
central heating all work. The plumber is on 24-hour call.

Although it's the coldest point
of the calendar, winter this year has turned out unseasonably warm: the warmest,
they claim, in 130 years of observations. In December and the first half of
January the weather was damp and muggy. Rain fell frequently, as did wet snow,
which melted instantly; and our buildings were surrounded by an intractable,
improbable mud. Sixteen years ago this might have been possible to justify – as
a new, poorly serviced area, – but now! Nothing has changed – along both sides
of the asphalt paths you take from home to the metro or buses is a sea of deep
mud. We hadn't seen such mud for many years, since we left Russia. When the
temperature drops below zero, the mud turns into clods of ice. Furthermore, the
lifesaving asphalt is used not only by pedestrians, but also by cars, which push
you out of the way into mud, ankle-deep water, loose snowdrifts or onto ice.
The Russian pedestrian is a second-class entity.

But forty minutes' travelling in
the metro, and you find yourself in a different world. Renewed, regenerated old
Moscow made a big impression on me. Old mansions have been restored, and city
estates preserved. Entire streets and districts have been restored. Old churches
have been renewed and opened up, overflowing during service times, aglow with
lights at night, church song audible even on the streets. In newly-developed
areas new churches have sprung up, combining traditional and contemporary
architectural forms. The three-storey building on Strastnoy Boulevard in which
my early childhood was spent is still standing. Our third-storey windows still
look out onto the former Naryshkinsky Square. How many times I passed by this
building, past the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in Putinki, admiring the
upward thrust of its tented roof. But it was dead. Now the church is again
alive, again a house of prayer, and for the first time in my life I entered.

The Russian Orthodox Church,
persecuted even recently, has again, as was the case for centuries, turned into
a state church, tightly bound to the Russian state and the authorities. You need
only drop by the grandiose Church of Christ the Saviour, newly rebuilt and
raised from the ruins, with its colossal golden cupola again reigning above
Moscow. The splendour of its internal decoration and abundant gilt interfere
with prayerful concentration, going deeper inside oneself. But this is not the
cathedral's intention: or rather, it is not for this alone. Before you stands
the exultant state church itself. The cathedral is its symbol, and its close
proximity to the Kremlin is not incidental.

In Russia, everything is
contradictory and double-sided. In the renewal of the old, as in everything,
modern, two-faced Russia is reflected. Old Arbat and its adjacent streets and
lanes, deeply connected with the history of Russia's intelligentsia, no longer
belong to the people who once lived there. They are now given over to the firms,
shops and restaurants which cater to rich foreigners and home-grown nouveaux
riches. The well-restored walls remain, but the life has gone from them,
just as Moscow's intellectual life has gone, which flickered even in the Soviet
years. The Arbat spirit which Okudzhava[1]
celebrated in song has gone. It is now a shout-filled bazaar, an exultant
“victors' feast”.

The same story with Stoleshnikov
Lane and Petrovsky Passazh: they are cold and empty, the names of foreign firms
on their beautiful old facades, garlands of glowing electric bulbs hanging like
a spider's web above the street or emphasising the facades' architecture. But
lifeless. Where crowds once thronged, now only the occasional passer-by.

Here now is Spiridonovka and its
surrounding streets: the world of my childhood. People attentive to passers-by
roam old Moscow's renewed streets: in Soviet times they roamed around large
government buildings, but now they guard new masters, the representatives of
triumphant capital. This is modern-day Moscow. In today's Russia,
differentiating between power and capital is no easy task.

But Tverskoy and Gogolevsky
boulevards are as beautiful under snow as ever. It is on such boulevards on a
snowy winter's day or at dusk that the memory of that other, old Moscow is
preserved. A memory like virgin, untrodden snow.

I was struck, having come to
Russia after so many years, by the abundance of consumer goods. The crowds of
shoppers in the stores speak of the fact that people have money and something to
spend it on. But the people we know say that this is the situation only in the
cities, and in far from all of them.

Russians are, as before, notably
fond of their food. This may be a legacy of the lean years, or perhaps a
peculiarity of the national character. Here are the names of some goods on the
counters: Tvorozhok, Kartoshechka, Tortik. An advertisement
at one restaurant invites people 'to try our borshch with pampushechki'[2].

Moscow's central streets have a
multitude of expensive restaurants, and very few places where one can grab a
bite quickly and relatively cheaply. In this regard, Moscow is far ahead even of
St Petersburg. Cafés of another type are popular in Moscow. It is here that
people come 'to sit a while'. Almost all the café tables are taken, even during
the day. Young women predominate; sometimes, sitting at separate tables, are
young men with round, closely-cropped heads, secretively discussing something.
And it's improbably smoky: the smoke simply sits in the air.

* * *

The book shops... there had been
nothing like them in Russia for decades. The unaccustomed visitor is stunned by
the abundance of books on all spheres of humanist knowledge. Almost everything
of significance that has ever been published by Russian and emigré philosophers,
historians, writers and social and political figures has been re-issued. The
works of all the outstanding thinkers of the past, and influential (or simply
fashionable) modern Western authors, have been translated into Russian. The holy
texts of all world civilisations have been published. The catalogue of books on
mythology and religious studies published in Russian translation is enormous.
Esotericism, Eastern mysticism and theosophy are very popular. Alongside this,
the Soviet ideological legacy is being demythologised: I'll just mention Yury
Druzhnikov's book on Pavel Morozov[3].
The book, published by Russky Put', states in its blurb that it is 'addressed to
the Russian reader who wants to know the whole truth about the past, concealed
by the authorities even now'. Entire libraries of memoirs are being issued.
Splendid editions devoted to Russian cultural history and the traditional
Russian way of life stand on the store shelves. Alongside apologetic biographies
of Russian monarchs are Ivan Zabelin's re-issued classical works The Everyday
Life of Russian Tsars and The Everyday Life of Russian Tsarinas. The
wide range of cheap and accessible books from the publisher Azbuka-Klassika is
very good. New talented authors have appeared: I'll name only Dmitry Bykov's
book on Pasternak.

The memoirs of many of those
destroyed by Stalin have been re-issued. At the same time, books are coming out
whose authors attempt to justify Stalin's crimes. The works of modern
ideologues, the spokespeople for widely-held public sentiments, are being
published and re-published: the primitive Oleg Platonov and his 'enemies of
Russia', 'global conspiracy' and 'worldwide Jewish government'; or Sergey Kara-Murza,
with his idealisation of the Soviet past, and denial of the crimes of Stalin's
regime. There are books which claim that Soviet prison slave labour played a
large, positive role in the country's wartime defence readiness.

The denial of Stalin's crimes and
those of his regime is tantamount to the claim that there was no Holocaust, that
it was thought up by Jews. Hitler's supporters exterminated millions of Jews;
Stalin and his henchmen, millions of their compatriots of all nationalities.
That is the only difference. In Russia, authors who deny Stalin's Holocaust
enjoy respect and there is great demand for their books. The question arises:
are there really that many readers in Russia who 'want to know the whole truth
about the past'?

There is also demand for works
which portray Russia's history as one of Jewish domination. One such well-issued
book carries the subtitle Lectures for Presidents. The author evidently
hopes that the Russian authorities will at last pay attention to this disgrace
and adopt decisive measures.

The book market is many-sided, a
mirror of modern Russian society. It also reflects another facet of public
consciousness: I have in mind pseudo-scientific racist works. Of course, they
all have scientific pretentions, otherwise they couldn't win over the public's
trust. Their authors are nearly always professors or academics of some mythical
academy or other. One need only open a book to be convinced that it’s everyday
racism, not substantially different from the Nazi variety. The same Aryan
superiority, only now it also includes Eastern Slavs. But Nazi, Hitlerian racism
is in the past, discredited. Germany has moved beyond it and cast it away; but
in Russia it is flourishing.

Intellectual life in Russia is
passing through a period of 'overthrowing its idols'. Soviet-era idols have been
toppled from their pedestals, both literally and figuratively. There's a desire
to see great people to turn out to be just like us, and perhaps even much worse;
it's easier to live that way. The authors painstakingly expose the secret vices
of the great. One example is Boris Nosik's book Maclay's Secret. Nikolay
Miklouho-Maclay was one of the idols of the Soviet epoch[4].
It turns out (or so our author assures us) that he had a secret vice: he was a
paedophile. He was driven to New Guinea, the tropical forests of Malacca, the
islands of Oceania, not by the passion of a scientific researcher, but by the
fear that his secret vice would be exposed in Europe. The facts laid out in the
book have long been known, but they don't testify to Maclay's depravity. His
image has been distorted beyond recognition ad absurdum. There are many
such examples in modern-day Russian print.

However, new idols come along in
place of the old. Lev Gumilev is one. His works on historical and
historiosophical subjects aspire to be the latest word in science, however their
originality is exceptionally relative: much of it has already been said by
Spengler, Toynby and Chizhevsky. They operate on a few quasi-scientific
concepts: passionarity, the chimera, ethnos as a phenomenon of the biosphere.
His global constructions are the fruits of his fantasy. But he wins the reader
over with his fantastic erudition: his books are written with talent, often
brilliance, and have a semblance to science. The mass reader has no need at all
for scientific method and rigorous reasoning. Gumilev's popularity derives from
elsewhere: his works have triggered something in the depths of the mass
consciousness, responded to its innermost needs. Historical materialism no
longer satisfies anyone: it sets their teeth, so to speak, on edge. Gumilev has
filled a gaping hole and satisfied the need of the thinking and reading public
for another, new understanding of the historical process. Solar activity has
taken the place of productive forces – how is this worse? It's no disaster that
he doesn't always add up: it's only specialists who notice.

That's the key to the Gumilev
phenomenon. He also spent many years in the prison camps, had to endure a harsh
struggle with fate, and emerged victorious from the ordeal. His worshippers form
a kind of church, united around his name like a saint and prophet.

I was friendly with Gumilev in
those distant years when he very cautiously began to present his ideas on the
pages of books issued in small numbers by the Geographical Society in Leningrad.
Even then, in the sessions of the Ethnographical Division, he shone with
erudition, paradoxical thought and caustic wit.

* * *

What was the Lenin Library – the
country's largest – is now called the Russian State Library. The once numerous
busts of Lenin have disappeared from its halls, however the inscription ‘Lenin
Library’ remains above the main entrance. In front of the same entrance a
monument to Dostoyevsky has appeared, whom Lenin greatly disliked. The library
has noticeably fewer readers. In the first, 'professorial' hall are now only a
handful of people: this was never the case earlier. The readers themselves have
also changed: they are predominantly young graduate – and even undergraduate –
students or, on the other hand, elderly people. The spetskhran has
disappeared: the special holdings section, where censored foreign literature
went, accessible only to a select few. But then again, in the periodicals hall,
as in Soviet times, foreign newspapers are absent: here, tradition has been
maintained.

Alongside the Russian State
Library's rich fund of émigré literature, Moscow now has the Russkoye ZarubezhyeLibrary Foundation[5],
in spacious, splendidly appointed premises, with a cosy reading room and a good
book shop.

Next door is the Taganka Theatre,
where it used to be so difficult to get a ticket, and to where the dissident
intelligentsia so aspired; which was almost all, to a larger or lesser degree,
infected with opposition spirit. Now at the box office it's possible to get a
ticket to any show. What's the matter? I think it's that the theatre has lost is
former leftist, oppositionist significance, and turned into an ordinary,
respectable theatre. It's apparent even from the audience: in contrast to the
past, it has few intellectual faces. This has happened because that very same
opposition spirit has dissipated from the intelligentsia; the intelligentsia has
changed, withered, and the theatre has changed with it.

The Moscow Museum of Fine Arts...
The favourite canvases of my school years: 'The King's Wife' by Gauguin; 'Avenue
de l'Opera, Paris' by Pissarro, with its flurrying snow and carriages running
away into the distance. For the first time – wasn't it hidden away in storage in
Soviet times? – I saw Franz Masereel's 'Red Square' painted in 1935: ominous
black clouds above the Kremlin, the crenellated wall, the cold, alien mausoleum.
The painting exudes a feeling of fear and numbness. The artist, a foreigner
newly arrived in Moscow, managed to capture the atmosphere of terror the country
was living in.

Descending stairs which lead
underground in the capital's very centre, you find yourself in the new Moscow
Museum of Archaeology. Here, at a depth of several metres, is a
seventeenth-century bridge spanning the river which ran here at one time.
Walking out onto the square once again, you see a caricatured statue of Marshal
Zhukov[6]
in front of the Historical Museum, done in a way offensive to him. Moscow has
been sculpturally unlucky in recent times. Another, no less talentless – but
improbably active – sculptor has turned Aleksandrovksy Garden and the Moscow
River embankment, places dear to the Muscovite, into an exhibition of
flea-market kitsch[7].

And yet another new Moscow museum
– the Nikolay Roerich Museum, housed in an old noble residence on Maly Znamensky
Lane. The museum is devoted to Roerich, the artist and thinker, and contains his
pictures and collections brought from his travels in Central Asia. The museum
reflects the contemporary appeal of Eastern mysticism and unorthodox, esoteric
teachings. The exhibition's final room – with its portraits of mysterious
'teachers' and a mystical triptych of Roerich – is essentially a temple devoted
to him and his cult, a saint's temple.

* * *

The unaccustomed person is
shocked at first, but soon adapts. We are now descending into the underground
archaeological museum. Two men in black uniform with the word okhrana[8]on their jackets meet us at the entrance,
attentively and suspiciously inspect us, check our bags and ask us to pass under
the type of detector usually found at airports. No alarm ensued – neither hot
nor cold weapons found on us – and we can now quietly enjoy the old coins and
clay fragments unearthed during excavations.

Crowds of security and militiamen
are everywhere in Moscow: in tranquil museums and libraries, in book and grocery
stores, these idlers in dark uniform with okhrana on their backs even
hang about in cafés and snack bars. It seems that only public toilets are free
from them, but maybe I'm mistaken. No matter where you go, you're checked as if
you're boarding a plane. One might think that Moscow is in a state of war. In my
time, one could freely walk through the Institutes of Ethnography, Archaeology
and History. To enter my Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology now, or, say,
the Russian University of the Humanities, you must obtain an invitation from a
university staff member, show your passport and receive a single-entry pass,
valid only for that day. A passport is needed even to travel by rail from one
city to another. First you have to show it at the ticket counter, then when
boarding the train. Everyone and everything here is under constant, vigilant
control.

While on passports, I don't mean
an international but a domestic passport, unfamiliar to the citizens of Western
countries: the very same passport with a ‘place of permanent residence’ permit
which every Soviet citizen used to have. The Russian inhabitant needs this
passport at every step. It is a constant reminder that the Soviet past still
isn't far off.

When I arrived in Russia with
only a Russian foreign passport, I had to get a domestic passport as well. I'd
received my foreign passport overseas, and now had to fulfil the absurd
requirements of the bureaucrats from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: to
record the receipt of the foreign passport in the internal passport and annul
the note in the first about the absence of such a stamp in the second. It is
beyond any normal person to comprehend all this. But that's not all there is. To
fulfil this requirement, it was necessary to go to the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs twice: a first time in order to deposit both passports, and a second
time to collect them.

Similar requirements accompany
the life of the Russian inhabitant at every step. They are invented to provide
work for an innumerable army of officials. It is a country where the bureaucracy
prevails, and daily its inhabitants feel its grasping power. Like flies, they
flounder in the sticky bureaucratic web.

There are apparently even more
officials in Russia than there were in Soviet times. Now, having come to the
passport office to receive a new internal passport, I saw a large room and a
multitude of window counters within. Behind each sat an official, each busy with
some matter and each with their own functions. Many people sat waiting, or
crowded around the windows. Standing by a window, we were made to copy out by
hand a sample receipt posted on the wall with a dozen intricate columns: and
this in a country which again wants to become a superpower.

From the passport office, we went
to the local bank branch to pay for the new passport. Another crowd, and we had
to stand in two queues: first for one counter, then, for some reason, another.
What could have seemed simpler than paying the government for a passport... But
to think like that, you'd have to be an ignorant person freshly arrived from
overseas.

* * *

Moscow is a tough city.
Everywhere are multitudinous crowds, especially in the metro, in its countless
pedestrian tunnels and on peak-hour platforms. You shoulder your way into a
carriage: another crowd, silent and indifferently alien. People are tightly
pressed together, yet strangers to one another. It's true that I was almost
always offered a seat in the carriage, for in any crowd I was always the oldest.
Amongst those people I was the oldest of the city's inhabitants, knowing what
none of them did.

I won't ever forget the
unspeaking, thousand-headed beast moving unerringly to one side of the platform
along a narrow corridor, and the pitiful human stump it pressed against the
wall: a legless torso with a big, red face.

We then met several more of the
same, begging in metro passageways and on the trains. One comes to mind:
grey-haired, with a proud, sharply drawn profile, without legs, he pushed
himself off the ground with wooden planks gripped in his hands, making his way
through the carriage. And another encounter. A young man in camouflage and a
beret, perhaps a veteran of the Chechen war: he was too young for the Afghan
war. Legless, in a wheelchair. He moved independently, his hands guiding the
wheels' motion. Entering the carriage at a station, he addressed us: 'Good
people, please give what you can...'. Another time, I saw yet another pair: no
legs, in camouflage and berets. One was older than the other, with a stern dark
face. He could perhaps have been a veteran of the Afghan war.

It's possible that these are
professional beggars: I don't presume to judge. But if they're really veterans
of the wars which Russia waged, and is waging... Can you really imagine in our
day, for instance, an Australian veteran begging for money? Any Australian would
find the idea outrageous. Not a single Australian veteran would be so humiliated
as to beg money from passers-by or train passengers. I think the same is true in
other Western countries.

The people you meet on the street
and in the metro are withdrawn and unfriendly, unable to smile at strangers. A
young woman sits right before me in the carriage, a typical Muscovite striving
not to fall behind the latest fashion. She is in jeans embroidered with
colourful designs and fashionable boots with improbably narrow, pointed toes.
Her fingers have long, sharp nails. She has something of the bird of prey about
her.

Another familiar sight are
dead-drunk men, lying on the dirty floor of metro passageways, or in a puddle in
the street in the winter rain. People pass by indifferently.

Mass alcoholism is still
calamitous in Russia, joined now by a drug epidemic. I have two of Moscow's
freely distributed newspapers: every Muscovite finds them in their letterbox
each week. Many pages are devoted to the most diverse range of advertising. The
paper Ekstra Moskva Yug[9]
of 20 January 2007 is full of ads like this:

And so on, without end. A
multitude of specialised firms and medical centres. And like a cloying
nightmare, the words 'heavy drinking' printed in solid type again and again.
Demand generates supply, and the demand is limitless.

Advertising is another of
society's mirrors. It says a lot. What other ads do we come across in the Moscow
weeklies? A great number are published from edition to edition under the banner
of 'Occult Services'. What services are these? Here's an example of one ad: 'Valentina
Vladimirovna Romanova. Hereditary first-order magician. Enchant your husband
without harm or damage to his health. You'll feel same-day results. A potent
spell will rid you of your rival in a day. Your husband will hate his mistress!
I'll save you from infidelity forever. I can cast an unbreakable spell to
protect you from any witchcraft. 100% guarantee. The most powerful rituals.'

But it seems that even magicians
have rivals. The same page has an ad from a rival witch: 'Don't cast an
enchantment spell!', she warns. 'Are you sure it won't harm you or your husband?
that the spell has been properly done and he'll return to you a healthy man?
Tatyana Vasilyevna Timofeyeva, founder and director Centre of Family
Conflictology. Hereditary first-order magician, diploma-accredited in practical
magic. I'll help get your husband back and restore your destroyed family. I'll
return your loved one without harming him! Will remove a rival's enchantment
spell. Bad fall-out [! – V.K.] between lovers will spare you from infidelity
forever. Can cast an unbreakable protective spell, correct another magician's
work. Resolve all problems quickly, precisely, nonsense-free. Guarantee quick,
same-day result. Issue written guarantee.'

A 'fall-out' can also be arranged
by another specialist, the 'professional hereditary clairvoyant Anastasiya
Viktorovna Andreyeva... I'll return your loved one in a day, enchant him without
harm or damage to his health, for his whole life! I'll dispel your husband's
mistress. One visit is all it takes and you won't hear of her again! Bad
fall-out between lovers. I work in especially complex, advanced cases.'

It's not only centres labouring
in this advanced field, but entire academies: 'Academy of Love Magic and Family
Conflictology. Olga Nikolayevna Yegorova, hereditary clairvoyant, member Academy
of Occult Sciences, professional magician. I'll enchant your loved one, return
your husband to the family. Will stop affairs and estrange his mistress in an
instant. Just one session required for 100% results. I'll remove a spell your
rival has placed on your husband and protect him from her witchcraft. Through
influencing the subconscious I'll remove any thought of infidelity. I'll improve
your sex life through correcting your relations and an attractiveness ritual.
I'll correct work of unscrupulous magicians and charlatans. In especially
complex and well-advanced cases I’ll work on your problem together with COVEN (a
congress of Russia's most powerful magicians), consisting of 12 masters
initiated into the highest order of magic. All work comes with a life-time
guarantee! Work approval granted by Moscow city government!'

Thank you, Mr Luzhkov, on behalf
of the women deserted by their husbands. Thank you to the Moscow city government
for supporting witchcraft – a vital factor in strengthening the family.

One witch, understanding
'influence on the subconscious' in 'complex' cases to be insufficient, promises
the 'return of lost affection using the methods of incantation, white magic and
voodoo'.

Unfortunately, family
strengthening can incur flawed service. One woman turned to the courts with her
complaint: she paid a witch-clairvoyant $700 and her husband indeed came back to
her. But the witch's professionalism was, evidently, lacking: her husband
returned impotent. 'I have no need for an husband like this,' the woman
declared. She said she'd been deceived and demanded the witch refund her.

'Hereditary clairvoyant' Lidiya
Andreyevna Orlova looks into the roots of things. She calls her method
'sex-binding'. 'Your loved one will be able to have sex only with you. My
personal written guarantee.'

As does Yuliya Borisovna Agapova,
'bearer of the unique gift of an ancient clan of Altaic healers. The 'ring of
slavery' ritual confers full, unlimited power over your loved one and a strong
bond on the sexual plane. An end to humiliation and suffering!'

'Full destruction of any
relations between your husband and his mistress, to the point of loathing,' is
also guaranteed by Vera Aleksandrovna Nikolayeva. 'He's fully yours – in mind,
body and soul! Forever! Now it'll be her to suffer, not you,' Vera Aleksandrovna
promises.

Aren't these quotes plenty? It's
only a small part of the ads, but each reads like a poem. What an understanding
of female psychology, and what priceless material for the ethnographer and
social psychologist!

You don't get the impression
you're in the capital of a country that wants to be thought of as a 'great
power', or in a centre of science and culture; but instead in some far-flung
place, some African or Papuan village lost deep in the forests, with its rival
witches. Is it not terrifying to find yourself in the midst of people living in
a world of witchcraft, white and black magic, disenchantment and enchantment,
incantation and voodoo, where wizards and witches unknown to you, along with
twelve of Russia's 'most powerful magicians', violate your will without your
knowledge, influence your 'subconscious' and, recalling the 'ring of slavery'
ritual, turn you into a weak-willed slave? The people at whom these ads are
aimed are, after all, long used to violence against the human being.

I'll confess I'd find it
terrifying. If witchcraft is so well advanced in society and is as effective as
these advertisements' authors assure us, why should their activity be confined
to familial and marital relations? It would also penetrate other spheres of
life. Where people believe in witchcraft's effectiveness, they turn to witches
for help with many diverse motives, including the most sinister.

Can such a society be called
Christian? Almost all these people – the witches and their clients – are
convinced that they believe in God. But in which one?

Though the women can be
understood. It's said in the papers that almost half the women in today's Russia
are single, that 175 in every 1,000 have never been married, 180 are widowed,
110 divorced and unmarried, and that the country has 15% more women than men.
It's also said that the average life expectancy for men is 58 years, lower than
in Pakistan, that Russia's population shrinks by 750,000 people annually, and
will barely exceed 100 million by 2050.

But are Russia's 'most powerful
magicians' able to stop this process? Are academies of 'love magic' and 'occult
sciences' capable of solving the country's demographic issues?

These advertisements have little
original, and it's all on other pages as well. But there's something very
Russian about the initial two groups.

What's an irresolute Russian man
to do with an authoritarian Russian wife, who needs him 'mind, body and soul'
and is prepared to achieve her goal at any cost, even at the risk of his health?
It's not for nothing that a witch would promise to return him 'unharmed and
without damaging his health'. His two possible escapes are in drink, or in the
'sweet inchling' who requires nothing from him other than money.

* * *

A person arriving in Russia after
a long absence is struck by two things: how much has changed and how little has
essentially changed – most of all, in people's hearts. Has private initiative
boomed on an unseen scale? Yes, but people were always drawn to it, including in
Soviet times, when it was stifled, taking on the unsavoury forms of the
underground 'third' economy. The scale of this illegal economy was gigantic and,
when the prohibitions were at last removed, this element burst out like a genie
from a bottle. Has private initiative now acquired legal forms? In a formal
sense yes, it exists legally, but the people we spoke with in Russia assured us
that it nearly always has a criminal character.

Yes much has changed, but what do
these changes signify? Here is Manezh Square in the capital's centre. It's the
square where we demonstrated in our thousands during the perestroika
years. Now, you wouldn't believe it was possible. I remember the sea of people
which filled the entire, enormous square. I remember the handful of people on
the speakers' rostrum next to the Hotel Moscow, and Yury Afanasyev[10],
who finished his short speech with the words, 'Long live the new February
revolution!': the event was in February or March. The people in the square
responded with impassioned cries and threats to those sheltering behind the
Kremlin walls nearby.

Now it's all different. Manezh
Square itself isn't the same. Strictly speaking, it has disappeared and is no
longer. In its place is an enormous underground complex of boutique stores and
restaurants, covered overhead with some cupolas, innumerable stairs, railings,
sculptures. The authorities have done everything to destroy the very place where
people might assemble and threaten them, and the very possibility to assemble
and threaten. But the goal of the former square's reconstruction isn’t limited
only to this. The goal is also in part to re-educate the people, to turn the
citizenry into the consumer, the philistine, unleash their consumer instincts
and thereby forever supplant their civil sentiments. This is all the easier to
achieve while those sentiments are undeveloped and unstable.

The former Manezh Square is a
symbol of what occurred in Russia in those years. The same can also be seen
close by. Here, next to the Historical Museum, are the restored Resurrection
Gates and the Iversky Chapel, once destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The goal of
those who revived them wasn't only to restore an historical monument, but first
and foremost to obstruct mass access onto Red Square. The Historical Museum's
main entry has been moved from Red Square, where it always was, to a side
entrance. The authorities try all means available to isolate themselves from the
people, whom they have always despised and feared. They don't want a new
'February' revolution, as illusory as it may have been.

What happened in 1990's Russia?
The words, slogans and job titles all changed, but the power structure remained
as before; the external attributes of power changed, but its essence was
retained. It was simply that new people came along, gave themselves new titles
and occupied the same cubicles and chairs. And the people are still the people:
they're capable of short-lived outbursts, but incapable of the prolonged,
persistent efforts required to hold on to their victories. The more indifferent
and passive the people, the more persistent and aggressive the authorities. They
take what the people can't keep hold of. This is true of any country's people,
but especially in Russia, with its historical traditions of absolutism. The
Russian people showed both their inability to preserve their hard-won democratic
freedoms, and a simple incomprehension of their necessity, once in 1917 and
again in the 1990s. I wouldn't start blaming the Russian authorities: the blame
lies with the people themselves. The authorities are just those necessitated by
a passive and politically undeveloped people, which has given up the most
important element in a democracy like some unnecessary thing: the real
possibility of controlling the authorities.

Certain peculiarities of the
modern social consciousness, and its attitude to the country's past and present,
can be felt in the Museum of Modern Russian History. It is of course no longer
the Museum of the Revolution, as it was earlier called. The portraits of
People's Will[11]terrorists, removed from display on Stalin's
orders – he who had himself unleashed monstrous terror, fearing his own life –
have now reappeared. With the Soviet authorities' sanction, terror was 'elevated
to the ranks of state policy', the exhibit's accompanying text says. But as we
approach the 1930s, something strange begins. The repressions of Stalin's regime
aren’t shown as an organic phenomenon of Soviet history, but merely an
unpleasant detail which, alas, spoilt the magnificent picture of 'Socialist
modernisation' and the 'affirmation of new ideals of public life'. It's as if
the text contained two voices interrupting each other, one trying to drown out
the other; and, at last, succeeding.

I've already remarked upon the
abundance of new and re-issued books on Russian history in the bookshops. This
would seem to be evidence of a mushrooming public interest in national history.
But in reality, one forms the impression that the mass of the public is ignorant
of and indifferent to it. Only a narrow section of society has an interest in
history: the reading public for pseudo-historical works, like Boris Akunin's
novels, is significantly larger. People not only don't know, but don't want to
know, their history, even relatively recent. How to explain a mass phenomenon
like nostalgia for Stalin and the Stalinist empire? There are several possible
explanations, one of them being the conscious, intentional unwillingness to know
the truth about that time. Only an insane person suffering total memory loss
could wish its return. It's not necessary to be in possession of your own
memory, like many people of my generation. Memory can rely on a knowledge of
history: not falsified, not mythologised, but real. The modern Germans possess
such a collective memory, for instance. But Russia is not immune to a relapse
into its past.

Violence against history – in
both books and journalism – has become a universal phenomenon in Russia.
Historical ignorance is especially widespread amongst the young. Our friend, a
history professor in one of St Petersburg's higher education institutions,
shared his impressions of exam interactions with students more than once. At one
recent exam he heard that the Great Patriotic War was a war between Russia
(students don't use the word 'USSR') and Germany, led at that time by Napoleon,
and that the war's main battle was the Battle at Kalka[12].
'That's the type of student we have in Russia these days,' he concludes, 'and
the level to which school education has sunk.'

Modern Russia, like its émigré
representatives abroad, has a large category of people stuck in the past. They
are like 'living fossils'. Their consciousness is mythologised. They are
dreamers who dream not of the future, but the past: the past of their
imagination. In émigré communities, which include the descendants of the first
post-Revolutionary wave, they live on illusory notions of “holy Rus'”, which in
reality never existed. They imagine themselves the loyal subjects of both
long-deceased Russian monarchs and today's authorities, towards whose
representatives they act with unconcealed servility. Those in modern Russia were
psychologically formed in the Soviet period and continue to live in it, keeping
all the Soviet myths and stereotypes in their consciousness. In 2007 they will
ceremoniously celebrate the 90th anniversary of the 'Great October',
forgetting that the same year is also the 70th anniversary of 1937,
the peak of Stalin's 'Great Terror'.

In Moscow, in a park near a
branch of the Tretyakov Gallery in Krymsky Val[13],
monuments to dethroned Soviet 'leaders' are on show: they've been brought to
this place from all over Moscow. Some are standing, others have toppled over.
Amongst that bygone era's monuments is a grandiose Stalin, though, alas, with a
chipped-off nose. He's been included in this symbolic sculptural complex
dedicated to his victims, countless human faces behind iron bars. At Stalin's
feet we saw some half-visible carnations left by an admirer. I can't discount
the possibility that the person who left them could be a descendant of a victim
of Stalin's terror machine, but, like very many people, had forgotten or was
unwilling to acknowledge it; feeling, like all the rest, a nostalgia for the
lost, 'great' epoch.

There's also a monument to the
victims of Stalin's terror in St Petersburg. Two sphinxes, each facing the
other, with the faces of those who met their ruin in gaols and prison camps.
Verses of Akhmatova and other poets are on the pedestals. The monument has been
erected on the Neva embankment, symbolically called the Robespierre Embankment,
opposite the main Petersburg gaol, Kresty, and not far from the Bolshoy Dom, the
headquarters of the political police. According to the legend created by the
city's residents, here, in this place, a pipe ran from the Bolshoy Dom's cellars
into the Neva, carrying the blood of torture victims and even their corpses. The
monument was designed by Mikhail Shemyakin[14].
Both of us – Shemyakin with his ancient Egyptian sphinxes, and I in my essay
'The People and Power' (in The Eternal Present[15]),
where I compare Russia under Stalin’s regime with Pharaonic Egypt and other
ancient Eastern monarchies, – we both, independently of one another, have
succeeded in capturing the era's spirit.

Petersburg residents say that the
monument isn't recognised by the authorities as an official monument to the
victims of Stalinist repression, although the city mayor granted permission for
its erection. It is only human rights campaigners who lay flowers at the
monument. This concurrent non-denial and non-recognition of the monument's
existence is very typical of modern Russia. Moreover, it’s being systematically
destroyed by vandals. This isn't surprising.

In Russia, however, there do
exist people and organisations who, in spite of everything, strive to preserve
memory of the past and publicise its truth, however bitter this truth may be and
however it may wound the national conscience. Amongst these organisations –
islands of memory in an ocean of oblivion – are the Memorial society and the
Andrey Sakharov Museum and Public Centre in Moscow. The first strives to
immortalise the victims of totalitarianism, the second has made its main goal
the affirmation of civil society and democratic values in Russia: a goal still
far from realised.

The Russian press – with the very
occasional exception, such as Novaya Gazeta, where Anna Politkovskaya
worked – sees its main mission as instilling the inhabitant with information and
views necessary to the leadership, and keeping inconvenient information from
print. The impression is of a press which systematically publishes material
'from above', with the goal of creating a positive image for the representatives
of Russian authority, and a negative representation of their opponents within
and outside the country.

On a visit to acquaintances in
Moscow one day, they told me that jamming had commenced of foreign
Russian-language radio broadcasts. This was shortly after the murder in London
of a former Russian citizen who had been granted asylum in Great Britain. The
post-war jamming of foreign radio broadcasts continued throughout the entire
Cold War. It may be that the renewal of jamming foreign radio is the start of a
new Cold War. I think, however, that radio jamming is a pointless exercise in
our time: those interested in objective information can get it on the Internet.
Those who have no need for it – probably the overwhelming majority of the
Russian population – don't listen to foreign radio.

I also got an unexpected sense of
the Cold War in Moscow's main post office: a war, it is true, merely with a
former Soviet republic disloyal to Moscow. A notice on the wall announced that
the parcel service to Georgia had been 'temporarily suspended'.

Russians are a credulous people,
naively and simple-heartedly believing everything instilled in them by a
well-organised system of influencing the population's minds. They are convinced
that their president is a believing Christian, a model family man, that he's
surrounded himself with worthy helpers, and that a hostile West is endeavouring
to destroy Russia. Many of these people have access to the Internet and Western
information. It's obvious that they consciously reject it, that they have no use
for it.

Conformity was and remains the
Russian's primary characteristic: an uncritical acceptance of the existing order
and opinion-setters, and a hostility to dissident thought. At elections, they
obediently vote for the designated candidates.

Informal interpersonal
relationships have always played a large role in Russia, and have always been
more important than relationships based on formal law. 'Understandings' stand in
place of the law.

As the Duma and presidential
elections drew nearer, the country's 'political' life grew livelier. Surprising
opposition parties popped up, vying in their loyalty towards the authorities and
thanking them for having permitted their political activities. These ‘opposition
members' very much love the leadership, and why wouldn't they: they're obliged
to it for their very existence. They are a special type of Russian groveller, a
grovelling which is subtle rather than up-front:

'Permit me, Your Excellency, to
tell you directly, frankly, in plain Russian... and do forgive me for my
directness... I love you, Your Excellency... You are a genius, Your
Excellency... Now please don't get angry...'.

The world has never seen such an
opposition. This is Russian democracy, and the level of its political and legal
consciousness.

There are also other opposition
parties, however. They're few in number and don't enjoy the authorities'
patronage, and are dispersed by police batons when they dare to turn out in the
streets.

The character of the Russian
people was well expressed by Bulat Okudzhava in his song 'Master Grisha', who
will one day come to set life right, rectify and sort out everything. The people
greatly need such a master, and when he at last appears are very content.

And what of the Russian
intelligentsia? Emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries,
it became a social class previously unseen not only in Russia but other
countries. It wasn’t merely a stratum of the educated, but the people's
conscience. In the absence of political life in the country it became the ruling
regime's opposition, a role it occupied right until 1917. Through the mouths of
its writers, poets, thinkers and publicists it bore the truth about the
country's life and its people, and 'sowed the rational, the good, the eternal'.
It was bearer of society's spiritual and moral values, and the ideas of
democracy and the individual's rights and freedoms. In the years of Soviet
power it was destroyed: not educated people, but the historical mission of the
Russian intelligentsia and its place amidst the country's life and people.
Intellectuals remained, but not the intelligentsia. In the post-Stalin years of
1960-90 it attempted to regenerate itself, but by the end of the '90s had again
fallen into decline and turned merely into the social stratum of intellectuals,
people of creative industry, and specialists in various spheres it had been in
Soviet times. Its former democratic ideals lay discredited in the social
consciousness. Its former, traditional mission is no longer called upon. The
Russian intelligentsia – in its traditional role – is no more, just as there
have long been no nobility and peasantry. But the intelligentsia's loss has been
an irreparable one for the country, both spiritual and moral.

I'll never forget New Year's Eve
in Moscow. Ceaselessly for several hours: fireworks explosions lighting the
black sky over the city, the cracking and whistling of rockets. It all vividly
reminded me of nights on the front: there too, flare rockets burst all night,
mines exploded, gun shots cracked. In this purchased, gigantic New Year
spectacle, devoid of any genuine joy, there was something hysterical, even
sinister: it wasn't for nothing that it sparked recollections of the front.
Nobody in this drunken crowd probably remembered the fact that, in the receding
year, quite recently, in this city, in the entranceway to her own home, a woman
had been shot dead: one of the world's most courageous.

Her courage bordered on insanity.
Locals called her the 'Moscow madwoman'. In the old Russia, those who dared to
tell the authorities the truth were called holy fools and blessed. They were
considered saints, cathedrals named after them. In the centre of Russia's
capital a cathedral named after one such 'Moscow madman' still stands. But times
have changed. Today, the people need bread and circuses: and they're given them.

* * *

A different, but also
apocalyptic, scene is linked with my first night in St Petersburg: the damp
twilight, a cuttingly cold wind, Nevsky Prospekt drowning in dirty snow sludge,
and aflame in the middle of it, in front of Kazan Cathedral, an automobile. The
bright flames' reflected glow shimmers on the buildings, and on the faces of the
crowd which has gathered around.

There's a cross above Kazan
Cathedral, which had not been there for the decades it was home to the Museum of
Religious History and Atheism. Now that atheism has been thrown aside, the
museum is now simply the Museum of Religious History and is located elsewhere,
on Pochtamtskaya. The nature of the exhibits hasn't changed substantially, but
the museum now has a new type of visitor. The most popular exhibit nowadays is a
large painting commissioned by someone high in the Orthodox hierarchy in 1907.
In its centre, in a beam of light descending from the heavens, are Tsar Nicholas
II and his wife, and lower, monarchists loyal to the throne, with recognisable
portraits – Purishkevich, and others to the right and left, – and
revolutionaries and mutineers with red flags, overthrown by some mysterious
higher force. At that time monarchists and Black Hundreds[16]
activists stood with firmness and assurance, the revolutionaries with a most
pitiful appearance, falling and dropping their flags. This instructive painting
is especially popular amongst modern-day monarchists, who are constantly
photographing it.

As we were leaving the museum,
the cloakroom attendant we were conversing with urged us to visit the grave of
Saint Kseniya the Blessed in Smolensky Cemetery. It's the grave, in her words,
of the 'patron saint of St Petersburg'. And this, in what was until very
recently the Museum of Atheism! The main post office opposite sells icons with
text guaranteeing their holiness: 'Production by company Helio Shuttle blessed
by the Orthodox Church'.

The Church on Spilled Blood in St
Petersburg's centre, standing on the spot where Tsar Aleksandr II was murdered
by People's Will terrorists, was closed in Soviet times and fell into disrepair.
Its remarkable mosaics were ruined and it was customary to deride its
architecture. Now it's been fully restored in all its mystical grandeur. You
have to venture inside in order to feel the significance and lofty artistic
virtues of its architecture and decorations.

While possessing similar national
cultural treasures, Petersburg also wants to be like a Western city.
Advertisements, store signs, restaurants, amusingly mangled foreign words, are
everywhere. This clumsy imitation of the West is even more palpable here than in
Moscow.

Relations between Moscow and St
Petersburg have always had some antagonism, and the same is true of our time.
Petersburg residents say: 'We live in the kingdom of Moscow, not Russia.' But
Petersburg isn't the only victim of contemporary administrative and economic
centralisation: the entire life of an enormous country is today decided in
Moscow, many perceptive people comprehending that this ugly centralisation is
just as pernicious for today's Russia as it was earlier for the Soviet Union.

* * *

Soon after arriving in Moscow, my
wife and I went to the offices of the Federal Security Service, the successor to
the KGB. We get off at the Lubyanka metro station. The station's name makes you
shudder: in Soviet times, the word 'Lubyanka' was the universally understood
synonym for an institution from which people, once it had claimed them, never
returned. It is an enormous complex of buildings in the centre of Moscow.
Windows behind iron bars look ominously on passers-by from the black granite
wall. This seems to be the very same door I was also once led through...

In the FSB reception area I write
a statement: I was arrested in 1949, sentenced to 10 years, released in 1954 and
rehabilitated, and want to see my case notes. During the investigation my
personal archives had been taken away – diaries, letters, stories, photographs –
and, if they still existed, I wanted them back. I live in Australia, I wrote on,
and ask that my request be met during my time in Moscow, as I'd hardly be able
to come back again....

Two or three weeks later I’m
invited over the phone to the reading room of the FSB's Central Archive.

Kuznetsky Most[17].
It was here that people would once come to find out the fate of arrested
relatives. An ordinary door of an ordinary building, a staircase, one more door
– this time of iron. A buzz. The door opens, we pass through. A door on the
right with the words “Veterans' Council”. Veterans of what – the KGB? The
reading room is straight ahead. A spacious, bright room with many small tables
for one or two visitors. Tranquil landscapes on the walls. An attempt to in some
way humanise the place where people encounter their broken lives, or the shadows
of loved ones. The shelves of the bookcase in the corner hold the fat volumes
issued by numerous local branches of the Memorial society containing hundreds of
thousands of names, all victims of the very institution we are now inside.

Besides us, there is one other
visitor in the room, with a laptop computer and opened files on her desk.

In front of me is placed a rather
fat, grey folder with the words: 'Case No. 3023. Accused Vladimir Rafailovich
Kabo and Yury Enokhovich Bregel. Opened 7 October 1949. Closed 6 April 1950.'
The sacred words 'keep in perpetuity', of which we read so much, are missing.

Yury Bregel was my school friend;
our friendship carried on after the war.

One can make notes and even order
copies, but not of the interrogation records. However, a few printed envelopes
have been glued to the folder, containing some inaccessible documents. We are
not to open them and don't know what's inside.

Who were these two political
criminals such an important institution – perhaps the most important state body
in the country – was concerned with? Who were these evildoers, undermining the
foundations of the state system? Before the war, they were school boys dreaming
of as-yet unclear political activity in the distant, foggy future: the naïve,
empty dreams of teenagers who don't understand the world they inhabit. They
dreamed of other things too: I wrote, for instance, and wanted to devote myself
to literary work. After the war, history students, strongly drawn to science and
preparing ourselves for scientific work. Our interest in politics was limited to
conversations with friends.

Normal teenagers, normal young
people, unfooled by propaganda. Critical thinkers, yes, but I wouldn't emphasise
the word 'thinkers', because this is also the ability to form thoughts
independently and autonomously. And so this was their crime. In this country,
the authorities have always seen such people as their enemies. We deserved what
we got.

But the organs had too little on
which to put away two students: they were very keen to show that they'd managed
to unmask an entire student organisation. It's plainly evident from our case how
nothing was fabricated out of nothing, and how the case was constructed and
collapsed.

Our case investigator,
Odlyanitsky, attempted to 'create' an anti-Soviet organisation consisting of
several of my friends; it was immediately apparent however that it consisted of
only the two of us, myself and Bregel. Our friend Sergey Khmelnitsky – it later
turned out, a secret operative for the security services and an agent
provocateur – was also, according to the investigation transcript, a member
of our group, a person of 'anti-Soviet tendencies'; but, completely
unaccountably, removed from our case and not brought to account.[18]
The inexplicable disappearance of one of the 'anti-Soviet' group's members is
striking in its naked cynicism.

And that was the extent of our
case. It had no witnesses. The material evidence was several letters Bregel
wrote to me during the war. The investigator attempted to read something between
the lines. In our correspondence, we discussed, the investigation asserted, 'in
a veiled form', 'a plan to create an anti-Soviet organisation'. The prosecutor
who reviewed my case in the 1950s writes that, on the basis of the letters, 'it
is unclear with what aim they wanted to create the group' and remarks, in
passing, that the conspirators were still school children. But this was after
Stalin's death, when the monolith he had created started to show its first
cracks and began to review political convictions.

Nella, a student in my year,
wrote to me during the holidays that she had noticed some 'unexpected analogies'
in Poliyevktov's book Nicholas I; with what in particular, she didn't
say. The letter was taken from me during the search and incorporated into the
case; but fortunately, everything concluded well for her. Also found in my
possession was a letter from Alik Osipov, a school friend, written during the
war. He was then living with his mother in Siberia, I with my parents in the
Altay. Alek told me to take a short trip, to hear what people were saying.
'You'll see a large, beautiful bridge with piles of sawings,' he wrote. The
investigator had seen some sort of hint in this image; but everything also
turned out well for Osipov.

When I was called into the army
at the beginning of 1943, I indeed came to hear much that was new and unexpected
along the road from Oyrot-Tura to Tomsk. I heard stories about the superiority
of the German army, with the barely concealed hope that the Germans would
conquer the Red Army and the Soviet order would collapse.

I bore further guilt as a
consequence of my acquaintance with 'foreign intelligence agents': Helène
Peltier, the daughter of the French naval attaché and student of Moscow State
University; and Peter Kelly, a British diplomat. Khmelnitsky had introduced me
to both. Both meetings with Kelly took place in Khmelnitsky's presence, and were
known to the investigation only on the basis of his account. The re-examining
prosecutor's conclusion states that one meeting took place 'in the source's
apartment', without any other witnesses. 'The source' is Khmelnitsky. Fulfilling
the organs' mission, he initiated the creation of a literary circle, although
this was attributed to me in the investigation. Khmelnitsky remained at liberty
and continued the organs' vital work.

Any collective creative activity
– which young people are so apt to strive towards – qualified to the
investigator's way of thinking as 'anti-Soviet'; and the attempt – the mere
attempt – to create a literary club is called in the transcript 'active hostile
work'.

Khmelnitsky was the main, if not
sole, source necessary to the investigation, and this is confirmed by its
materials: it all relies on his information. News came from the university that
I had been 'discussed' at a Komsomol meeting for a report I had given at a
philosophy seminar in defence of genetics against the academic Lysenko[19],
and that I had been strongly condemned for defending Professor Rubinstein, my
scientific supervisor, who had been driven from the university as a
'cosmopolitan'.

The investigator also attempted
to use my stories as evidentiary material; one of these Khmelnitsky had manually
transcribed before my arrest and passed on to the organs. According to the
investigation transcript, in these stories I 'tried to show one person, hero of
all the stories, following the path of freedom from dead dogmas'.

The investigator's efforts
clearly didn't bring about the desired result; he even tried to present a
meeting with Yury Bregel in 1941 in Perm, to where his family had been
evacuated, as an intentional meeting of two plotters. In reality, the train
which took my family and other evacuees from Moscow to the Altay simply passed
through Perm. The 'plotters' were then only 16 years old.

'Towards the end of 1941, we,
being 17-year-old youths [the investigator added a year – V.K.], made a promise
to each other to devote our lives to the struggle for democratic freedoms in the
USSR,' one of our interrogation records states. Isn't it reminiscent of Herzen
and Ogarev's oath on the Sparrow Hills?[20]

Attached to my case notes is an
official note concerning the incineration of all papers and documents taken
during the search, with the exception of several letters. Burned are all my
diaries and my first childhood notebooks. I began keeping a diary in 1934, at
the age of nine, and kept one until 1941. Burned are all my literary juvenilia,
written with such inspiration and delivered at literary evenings at the literary
studio of the House of Pioneers. Out of everything I wrote in those years, only
two historically-themed stories were preserved, thanks to Vera Vasilyevna
Smirnova, the literary studio teacher, who had submitted them for a competition
and then kept them until my return from the prison camp.

And here's the very same piece of
paper – 'arrest and search warrant', with the Ministry of State Security stamp –
an operative thrust into my face, having barely awoken, deep in that October
night in 1949.

All of it was a tragedy: for us,
the guilty, and for our poor parents. They perhaps endured it much more heavily
than we ourselves.

... Here I am in the cemetery,
amongst birch trees, before this large, grey stone. Winter. Life again carries
me off into the distance, and again they accompanied me on the distant journey;
just as then, on that endlessly distant winter's day in the Altay. I went away
to war and we were separated. How many and what ordeals lay in store for us, we
were still unaware. We were unaware that I myself would be to blame for much.
Together we went, ever further from town, and at last they stopped, the sledge
carrying me away into the distance, and for a long time I could still see them
standing side by side on the steppe, following me with their eyes.

August 2007

Canberra

Translated by Matthew
Bogunovich

[1]Bulat Okudzhava (1924-97): singer-poet known
for his distinctive chanson style. His widespread appeal in the
Soviet Union was due in great part to his independence of spirit vis-à-vis
‘official’ Soviet culture.

[2]-ok, -echka and -ik are
all diminutive endings in Russian. The literal meanings of the brand names
given here are: 'little cottage cheese', 'little potato', 'little cake'.
Pampushki (rich bread rolls) is already a diminutive form, hence the
humour of the form pampushechki. It is also the Ukrainian translation
of the title Boule de Suif, the Guy de Maupassant story which deals
in part with a prostitute wronged by social values (Russ. Pyshka).

[3]Pavel (or ‘Pavlik’) Morozov (1918-32): the
'pioneer' (member of the young Communist movement) who denounced his parents
to the authorities as ‘enemies of the people’ for their resistance to
agricultural collectivisation; and was thereby held up as an example to
Communist youth. The official account of the Pavlik Morozov story had him
killed by his older relatives in revenge, who themselves were later
executed. His story was explored as a Soviet myth by Catriona Kelly in her
book Comrade Pavlik: the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London:
Granta Books, 2005).

[4]Nikolay Nikolayevich Miklukho-Maklay (Miklouho-Maclay)
(1846-88): Russian natural scientist with a keen interest in indigenous
cultures and concern for the impact of colonialism. A romantic figure owing
to the breadth of his exotic fieldwork, which included travels throughout
south-east Asia, Australia and Oceania.

[6]Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov (1896-1974):
Red Army marshal famed for his victories against German forces in World War
II. Massively decorated, his foreign awards included the Order of the Bath
(UK) and the Grand Cross of the Legion d’Honneur (France).

[7]Talentless sculptor: Zurab Tsereteli (1934-
), the Georgian-born sculptor whose visibility has been greatly magnified by
the patronage of Moscow’s mayor, Yury Luzhkov. His most famous work is
perhaps the enormous statue of Peter the Great on the Moscow River; a tsar
much more commonly associated with the capital he founded, St Petersburg.

[10]
Yury Nikolayevich Afanasyev: liberal Russian historian, founder of the
Russian State University for the Humanities.

[11]People's
Will: in Tsarist times, a prominent political movement which aimed to
destroy the Russian monarchy and re-establish the country as a
constitutional state along socialist lines. Lenin’s brother Aleksandr was a
member of its terrorist wing.

[12]Battle at Kalka:
between the Mongols and early Eastern Slavic principalities in 1223, said to
have taken place by the Kalka River in modern-day Donetsk oblast, Ukraine.

[13]Krymsky Val: 'Crimean Rampart', a small
locality in central Moscow.

[14]Mikhail Mikhaylovich Shemyakin (1943- ):
artist, designer and sculptor known for his surreal, carnivalesque style. He
spent his early life in East Germany and was educated in St Petersburg,
where he came to collaborate with cultural greats such as the singer
Vladimir Vysotsky; later moving to Paris, then to his present home in New
York.

[16]
Black Hundreds: a fiercely tsarist movement in pre-Revolutionary Russia,
also known for its anti-Semitism.

[17]Kuznetsky Most: ‘Kuznetsky Bridge’, an up-market locale in central
Moscow just to the west of the Kremlin, home to embassies and galleries.

[18]
A fuller account of the pair’s investigation and imprisonment can be found
in Kabo’s autobiography The Road to Australia: Memoirs (Trans. P.R.
Ireland and K.M. Windle); Aboriginal Studies Press: Canberra, 1998.
Khmelnitsky’s work for the security organs is detailed in Chapter 5, ‘A Hero
of Our Time’, pp.115-41.

[19]Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976): the
Ukrainian agronomist and researcher vaunted to a position of tremendous
power by the Soviet authorities, initially under Stalin, partly thanks to
his wildly optimistic claims about his new crop varieties. Described by
Melvyn Bragg as the ‘self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian
wasteland into a grain-laden garden of Eden. Today, Lysenko is a by-word for
scientific fraud… and he damaged, perhaps irreparably, the Soviet Union’s
capacity to fight and win the Cold War.’ (In Our Time: Lysenko,
broadcast BBC Radio 4, 5 June 2008).

[20]Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812-70) and
Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev (1813-77): Russian dissident intellectuals who
founded the liberal journal Kolokol [‘The Bell’] while in
exile in London. Herzen, a philosopher and writer, was a central figure in
the movement to emancipate Russia’s serfs (which finally came to pass in
1861). Sparrow Hills: a wooded precinct on the banks of the Moscow River,
nowadays site of Moscow State University.